'Governing the Rice Market': Agriculture and the State in Industrial East Asia

Abstract

differentiated it from its counterparts elsewhere, both in the developing world and in the industrialised West. Yet there is one area of East Asian economic activity as regards which, despite widespread recognition of the fact that state intervention and protection have been particularly marked, little comparative analysis has been undertaken. That area is agriculture. In particular, there has been little comparative analysis of the forms and mechanisms of state intervention to 'govern the market' in agriculture. Agriculture has been, needless to say, a sector of the economy which few governments in the developed or developing worlds have left to be governed by the market, and the agonised negotiations over agricultural products under the GATT Uruguay Round testified to the strength of the forces supporting protection of domestic agricultural producers and the widespread resistance to the 'globalisation' of agriculture which the new WTO regime was seen as heralding. In East Asia, these forces had generated, over the preceding decades, rapid rises in the degree of state intervention in agricultural markets, so that the level of intervention, as measured by, for example, the extent of border protection, had came to exceed, as subsequent data will show, levels typical of the industrial West.